


A Fair Day's Work

by ProdigalQueer



Series: The Study of Time and Motion [1]
Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: Angst, But nobody knows that yet, Child Abuse, Eggsy Needs a Hug, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Harry Hart Lives, Hurt/Comfort, Mentor Merlin, Past Child Abuse, Platonic Bonding, Post V-Day, Roxy Is a Good Bro, This is the first part of what I hope to be a series, sorry it's all platonic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-13
Updated: 2016-01-13
Packaged: 2018-05-13 18:14:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5712217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProdigalQueer/pseuds/ProdigalQueer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“We'll get it sorted, bit by bit,” Merlin says evenly, and folds himself down onto the couch next to the blonde. Another slow blink, and the rhythm Eggsy's tapping with his left hand hesitates for the barest breath of a second before starting up again. </p><p><i>You can kill a man with a matchstick,</i> Merlin wants to say. </p><p> </p><p>The plane ride home from Valentine's bunker.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Fair Day's Work

**Author's Note:**

> This one has been in the drafts for a long time. I'm frustrated with it, and a bit worried it's too self-indulgent for anyone but me to enjoy, but here you go. Hopefully the first part in a series. No beta, so the inevitable mistakes are all mine.
> 
> There's not intended to be any pairing here, but if you squint and adjust your shipper goggles, there are several different ships you could slot it into-- and I'm totally down with all of it. I honestly have no idea where the series will take me, so have at it!

It is hours (and hours and _hours)_ before they're finally able to leave Valentine's gory hideout behind, with the shell-shocked elite-- both whole and headless-- left in the dubiously capable hands of their respective remaining governments. The damage to each country is so extensive that it leaves a stitch under Merlin's lungs like hard laughter or a heart attack. There is no time for either.

The sun is starting to dust the mountaincaps by the time they each stagger back aboard the plane, eyes ringed with the purple of exhaustion. The plane's cockpit operations are set completely on autopilot before they're even ten thousand feet up (an advanced, self-correcting, Kingsman-issue edition that makes Eggsy burble something slightly hysterical about R2D2), and Merlin is now slumped inelegantly in one of the chairs in the cabin, no room left in him to be a gentleman just now.

Roxy sits limply in another seat by the table, still in her airflight suit, her hair a tangled mess of dried sweat and helmet-head. She's got the hangdog look of exhaustion to her, but her eyes are clear, and her hands don't shake, though she's rubbing her thumb and forefinger together like she's dearly missing a cigarette between them. She's Lancelot through and through, and the handler feels a whisper of pride behind the heartbreak sitting heavy against his sternum.

Eggsy, on the other hand. The young man is sprawled on the sofa, his legs spread too wide, his collar undone, nearly every inch of visible skin blooming into the beginnings of a hundred mottled bruises. His eyes are still the too-bright sharpness of a strung out adrenaline high, and his hands are tapping urgent rhythms against the knees of his ruined suit. Merlin finds himself wishing the boy _had_ fucked the princess, honestly; he'd probably be much calmer for it. (There's a Star Wars joke there, too, but Merlin ignores the thought resolutely.)

Instead, thirty seconds after Merlin had closed the video screens, the onboard computer started up a wild beeping, indicating the cell doors were being opened rapidly, one by one. Then, Eggsy's shit-eating cackle had burst over the comms, his voice a curl of manic hilarity. “You really thought I'd bugger a princess when there's still work to be done, bruv?” Merlin hadn't had a chance to respond, before Eggsy'd followed up with a dramatic sigh, and said, “She didn't 'ave no lube in her cell, Merlin. Terrible conditions this lot's been held in, yeah?”

It had startled a laugh out of Merlin before he'd sworn blue at the cheeky idiot and guided him the rest of the way through the cells. Harry had always said the lad was full of surprises, hadn't he? Harry had always...

Merlin rubs at the soreness in his chest now, the thought coming back to hurt him like a bruise. He takes a deep breath in through his nose, and tries to loosen the line of his shoulders further. There is nothing, right now, that can be done by the three of them in this plane. Not in England, not in any other broken country, and not in a small, wretched little town in Kentucky. Stuck idle as they are in the air, now is the time to regroup and try to relax for a few hours, before they arrive back at HQ and have to hit the ground running for a fresh marathon of damage control with no conceivable end in sight.

Across the cabin, Eggsy begins tapping his foot along with the rhythm of his hands, his eyes flicking across anything and everything, and managing to focus on nothing. It won't do.

“Pour us some scotch, lad,” Merlin says, chinning towards the dry bar beside the couch. Eggsy's up like a shot, making Roxy wince a little at his energy as he steps jerkily to the crystal decanter and tumblers. He fills three of them with generous fingers of amber fire, setting the first in front of Roxy, the glass landing with a slightly sharper _thunk_ than is necessary. He winks at her, and Merlin catches her smiling back up at him-- catches how her brow curves as well, furrowing in concern.

Eggsy sets his own tumbler down on the table next to the sofa, before thrusting the remaining glass towards Merlin. It's yet another jerky, frenetic movement, and as Merlin grasps the tumbler, some of the liquor sloshes over the side of the crystal, dripping down his fingers. It's too thin and cool to be blood, but something small in Merlin's stomach still curls hard in an achy echo of shock. He's too old for it, he tells himself. Too _seasoned._

The scotch was Harry's favorite. Arthur-- well, _Chester's_ favorite, too. He doesn't remember James' favorite. He should. Why doesn't he?

“Watch it, for Christ's sake!” He snaps, the impotent fury bleeding into his words as he shakes the dampness off his fingers harder than he needs to. He looks up as he says it, feels his face hot like Kentucky asphalt, eyes piercing a glare into the boy's own: an easy target.

The rage is blanched from him in an instant when the younger man flinches back, hard.

“ _Sorry,_ ” Eggsy gasps out at him, taking a quick half-step back, his shoulders curled forward in a cringe, all the strung-out energy in his body suddenly coalescing. “'m sorry!”

The silence that follows isn't unlike the frozen moment after a gunshot, isn't unlike the slow-motion spray of blood across a scene jarred hard and hazy by sudden violence. There's a ringing in Merlin's ears, and he tastes copper in the back of his throat. Tries not to smell gunpowder in the air.

Out of the corner of his eye, Merlin can see Roxy vibrating in her seat so hard she nearly hovers. The inaction seems to pain her, her mouth twisted hard as she watches Eggsy with precise, _knowing_ eyes.  It jolts Merlin just as hard as the rest of it, wondering what language she's learned to read in Eggsy that he hasn't.

The lad himself is stone. Spine at stiff attention, his hands are curled into tight fists at his sides, and there is a slow seep of fuchsia stealing up his neck and across his cheeks. His eyes are inscrutable, burning a hole into the carpet at his feet. Merlin finds himself squinting, trying to translate the haggard lines of Eggsy's shoulders into paragraphs.

Very, very carefully, he lifts the glass to his mouth, and takes a sip.

It's enough. The pall stretched taut over the plane bursts and dissipates like an errant soap bubble, like it was never there in the first place. Eggsy quickly shakes his shoulders loose and becomes the young man Merlin's seen for the past year, tipping himself back onto the sofa again, back into the same sprawl as before, a rubber band snapping back to set-point. Every line of him oozes 'cocky and casual.'

Merlin's seen Eggsy look like this a hundred times in the past thirteen months but he's never _seen_ it before, until now. His gut twists hard. He mentally slots Eggsy as a top agent for undercover missions, trying not to feel ashamed of himself as he does it.

Eggsy snags his glass with a languid curl of his hand, and takes a sip, swirling the liquid so the ice cubes clink against the crystal. He grins against the rim, his eyes warm and young, like nothing in the past three minutes or _days_ has ruffled a hair of him out of place. There is dried blood at the corner of his mouth. “This stuff's _ace_ , Merlin! Nothin' near this posh at the Black Prince!”

Merlin hums a noncommittal answer, hands suddenly itching with an uncertainty that's achingly rare to him. He looks out the cabin window for a moment, and flips through options in his head like a Rolodex full of unfamiliar cards. Roxy-- _Lancelot--_ rises fluidly from her seat, glass in hand as she heads for the cockpit. The glance she gives Merlin lasts barely a second, but he reads it fluently now, the Rosetta stone laid clear to him inside the cabin in the space of breath and blinks.

“Where you goin', Rox?” Eggsy asks her, perking up. “You take one little trip into space and suddenly you're all keen on piloting?” He grins and shifts as though he intends to rise with her, his eyes bright and keen like going into the cockpit is suddenly _the most interesting thing he could possibly do_ , but she waves him off with a cheeky smile of her own.

“Just going to check in with Percival,” she tells him lightly. “I _might_ need to give him some hell about being laid up in medical with a twisted ankle while I saved the world.”

“Oy! Tell your brother I helped, then!” Eggsy shoots back, laughing.

Roxy's teasing smile turns warm and soft at the edges, perhaps taking in the bruises across his cheeks, and the dozens of nickle-sized discolorations smattered over his suit where bullets had ricocheted against cloth and skin. “Yeah. All right. You helped.” She swings open the cockpit door and sways through it, her hips swinging gracefully even inside unflattering airsuit. “A _bit_.” She shuts the cockpit door behind her like the snap of her parting shot, not even pausing to look at Eggsy's puffed-up expression of faux offense.

“A _bit,_ she says!” Eggsy scoffs lightly, looking for all the world like he's gazing intently out the plane window and not watching Merlin's every tiny movement out of the corner of his eye. He slurps another too-large sip of the scotch and crunches loudly on an icecube: the picture of an irritating, inelegant chav.

Deliberately nonreactive, Merlin lets the silence spin out between them, swirling his own scotch inside its glass.  He counts the seconds as Eggsy chews on icecubes.

 _Sixty-seven, sixty-eight, sixty-nine._ Eggsy gives in, his left hand picking up again against his knee. “So what happens next, then?” He asks, still carefully not looking at Merlin.

And the handler knows there's a million parts to the question. The Kingsmen have no King, America has no President, the Prime Minister has no head. Harry's body is presumably cooling in a Kentucky morgue. Eggsy failed the dog test. The world is a fucking mess on every level, and Merlin _isn't_ a magician, despite his name. He can't put it all right again with a wave of his outstretched palm, no matter how much he wants to.

So instead, he focuses back in on the plane where he sits, and the space between himself and the young man in front of him. He lets the world shrink down to between the aircraft's walls, to some sort of damage he might actually be able to help heal. That he wants very much to begin to sooth and mend.

He pushes himself to his feet abruptly and crosses the space in three long strides, lets himself lope smoothly and quickly from his chair to the sofa. Eggsy doesn't seem to so much as twitch, only Merlin _sees_ him now, in a way he hasn't in the past year. He sees the set of Eggsy's jaw as it tightens the barest fraction, and catches his slow blink that covers up another flinch. He's seen that combination jaw-clench-and-blink a hundred times during training (a parachute cut loose across the lawn), and suddenly a swoop of nausea cramps low in Merlin's gut. No wonder Eggsy couldn't shoot the fucking dog.  

“We'll get it sorted, bit by bit,” Merlin says evenly, and folds himself down fluidly onto the couch next to the blonde. Another slow blink, and the rhythm Eggsy's tapping with his left hand hesitates for the barest breath of a second before starting up again.

 _You can kill a man with a matchstick,_ Merlin wants to say.  “We'll start by seeing who's still alive. We'll get you into the full system under a codename. We'll all sleep for a solid eight hours because we're no fucking use to anyone if we're too tired to think straight.”

“I failed the dog test,” Eggsy says.

“Fuck the dog test,” Merlin gruffs back in brusque response. The boy goes still and careful and _small_. Merlin continues on, not pausing. “Then we'll get you and Roxy settled into Kingsman homes, assuming any are still standing.”

“That doesn't seem--” Eggsy begins, confused and hesitant, and Merlin doesn't let him finish with the word ' _important'_ before he reaches over and curls his hand around the back of Eggsy's neck, finding the skin still damp with sweat.  

“We'll get your mother and sister moved into it. _Immediately_.” There is meaning and gravity imbued in the statement that rolls between them like slow thunder, and he hopes, _hopes_ it will be clear enough to the lad beside him, that it will be _enough_ in general. At least to start with.

Eggsy's whole body locks up like he's had his temple pressed with a live signet ring, though whether it's at the words or the touch, Merlin can't tell. Probably both. The lad's hands freeze two inches above his knee mid-rhythm, and his chest stays inflated with a forgotten breath. His face is a blank slab of stone, except for his eyes which close in three slow blinks. Merlin rubs his thumb steadily against the straining muscles in Eggsy's neck in time to each blink, and waits it out.

“Easy,” Merlin murmurs quietly, thinking of the wild horses that grazed near his childhood home. “Easy, lad.”  He presses his thumb more firmly into a tensed knot near the base of the boy's skull, and it's like cutting a marionette's strings.

Eggsy lets out a shuddering hiccup, his whole body going boneless against the sofa. Merlin can feel fine tremors starting against his hand. Chest tight, he tugs the younger man's head down to press against his shoulder, and sits in silence, listening to Eggsy's ragged breathing, keeping time with the steady, gentle sweeps of his thumb against Eggsy's neck.

“I don't--” Eggsy rasps, his voice suddenly very young and very tired to Merlin's ears. He and Harry were children once, too, with heirlooms in their vaults rather than millstones at their necks. “I--” The younger man tries again. _“Fuck._ ” His voice cracks, and a tremor runs across his shoulders, and it's fine, it's _fine._ Merlin's thumb never pauses, and he keeps his hand heavy at the base of the lad's skull.

“ _Aye,”_ is all he answers, his own throat rough as it gives up the word. He knows they have both been here in this quagmire of grief before, in their own ways. Because saving the world is the easy part; it's living in it afterwards that tends to be the struggle.

They stay like that for long moments, as Eggsy's pulse and breathing slowly evens out. Merlin imagines Eggsy at twelve, at fifteen, at seventeen: face fresh with the same bruises darkening it now. The end of the world is nothing new; only the scale changes.

It will be months before life is back to anything resembling normal again. It will be weeks of sleeplessness and adrenaline and too many missions with too few agents. It will be days of burying the dead and mourning what can't be fixed-- dealing with grief immutable and sharp as a church-steeple's tip. It will be hours of meetings and paperwork and damage control and _hoping, hoping, hoping_ that the right things and people slot into place to pull civilization back together again at the seams.

_(It will be months before the pattern on an EKG monitor changes and John Doe's eyes open on strange surroundings and a phone call zips through space from Kentucky to Saville Row.)_

But for now, Eggsy's head is growing heavier against Merlin's shoulder, his breathing deep and even as he finally crashes into exhaustion. Merlin settles back further into the sofa carefully, bringing the lad with him to slump more fully into a proper sleep, never pausing the steady motion of his thumb. As though summoned, Roxy appears silently back through the cockpit door, her dark eyes warm and familiar as they meet Merlin's own. She curls gracefully into the armchair across from them, and rests her heavy head on the cushioned arm without a word.

It will be months and weeks and days and hours before anything is put back to normal, yes, Merlin thinks, as he watches her slip into a doze, her breathing leveling out to match Eggsy's. But he certainly won't be doing it alone.

He lets his own eyes shut as the plane carries them through empty air, and concentrates on the moment of peace.


End file.
